From owner-freebsd-advocacy  Fri Apr 16 21:23:50 1999
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To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Somewhat in my own defense
Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Message-Id: <19990417042346.CFCC614C45@hub.freebsd.org>
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 21:23:46 -0700 (PDT)
From: jkh@FreeBSD.ORG (Jordan K. Hubbard)
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 [I've been trying to post this for 3 days, but it keeps vanishing into
  /dev/null; let's try one more time before sending a letter bomb to
  postmaster@freebsd.org. :-)]

I've stayed out of these exchanges ever since I clearly saw that
public fighting wasn't going to buy us anything, but there have been a
number of points of view ascribed to me in this discussion stated as
if they were "fact" rather than someone's self-serving fiction, and I
just want to clear up any misconceptions people may have formed about
how I really feel here in the process.

First off, with respect to "passionate advocacy", I have absolutely no
objection to people being passionate about FreeBSD any more so than I
do about them being passionate about their wives or their professions.
This is a GOOD thing, obviously, and only someone who was dead could
possibly feel otherwise.  What I've objected to all along, and I think
quite a few of you know what I mean here, is raving advocacy with a
lot of shouting and flying spit.  That is to "passion" what a street
riot is to "a group of people expressing their views" and really, we
don't need it.  As David has already said several times, we've gone to
considerable lengths to ensure that FreeBSD is *not* associated in
people's minds with people throwing rocks and bottles and we aim to
keep it that way.  Our reputation is more important than that and I've
expended considerable personal effort in building bridges with the
Linux community which I wouldn't care to see dynamited in the name of
some short-term gain - it's just bad tactics.

Second, there have been a lot of misconceptions about my stance
concerning FreeBSD on the desktop or encouraging native ports to
FreeBSD, largely because when I'm quoted the quoters usually strip out
every bit of surrounding context and, as anyone familiar with the
media knows, even Mother Theresa could be made to sound like Hitler if
you were clever enough in selecting just certain parts of her public
pronouncements.  :-)

The following, which I posted to USENET a couple of days ago, sums
that up rather well so I'll just repost it here:

>Date:           1999/04/14
>Forum:          comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc 
>Posted on:      1999/04/14
>Message-ID:     <371576C6.9E0A2719@FreeBSD.org>
>Newsgroups:     comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
>Organization:   The FreeBSD Project
>References:     <924063216.639709173@news> 

 Navindra Umanee wrote:
 
 [referencing my recent interview with Internet World]
 > Indeed!  What a weird thing for Hubbard to have said...
 
 Not at all - it's called playing to your strengths.  FWIW, I think
 Linux's desktop focus is not one which will result in long-term success
 if it's done to the exclusion of other, more important features which
 OSes like Win98 and BeOS lack.  There are simply too many big guns aimed
 at this market and, what's more, Unix in general (and I include Linux)
 is coming from a long way behind and chasing a set of targets which
 aren't exactly standing still either when it comes to the desktop.
 
 Yes, I know about KDE and Gnome and while they're both noble efforts,
 they still don't really come close (for the typical computer user) to
 making it truly approachable.  If you want empirical proof, just stick
 your mother or father in front of a Un*x box and see how much more
 productive they are with it vs Windows.  Sure, there will always be
 somebody's grandmother who writes 1000 lines of C a day and can handle
 any Unix system you care to name, but that's hardly the "typical
 scenario" and it's definitely not what I've observed in the field.
 
 What's worse is that I can't even view a lot of web sites under Linux or
 *BSD because they use so damn many plug-ins that aren't even available
 for Netscape on *any* of its various Un*x incarnations.  Or how about
 pointcast?  You want a stock ticker-tape along the bottom of your
 screen, or the latest news from CNN automagically on your screen saver? 
 Forget it.  Win98, on the other hand, makes these sorts of features
 (which, believe it or not, a *lot* of people use) trivial to add and,
 again, I see a lot of my less computer literate friends using them and
 loving it.  I don't mean to make it sound as if I'm glorifying Windows
 here or anything, I'm simply saying "know your enemy and don't attack
 his fortifications, go around - you can get killed charging machine gun
 nests you know! :)"
 
 Another slightly annoying thing is the extent to which I'm misquoted by
 some of these magazines (though this one got most things I said right,
 if you don't include the comment about grizzled unixheads :).  For
 example, I'm widely quoted as saying that I actively discourage native
 FreeBSD ports when what I originally said was (and pay close attention)
 "For those companies who are contemplating ONLY a single port, or are
 just getting back into the Unix market and only have the initial
 resources for one port, I encourage them to port to Linux and get the
 widest possible user base."  I didn't say I didn't want any FreeBSD
 ports at all, I said that if you're only going to do one, you might as
 well make it Linux and not, say, SCO or Solaris because our chances of
 running either binary are frankly much smaller.  This is just common
 sense, especially when you figure that any company which does re-enter
 the Unix market and gets burned is not going to be a vendor which is
 easy to convince to try again.
 
 As far as my comment on ceding the desktop is concerned, that's another
 one which got somewhat overstated and is missing a lot of context.  I
 believe the question was that if I had to choose a single focus, what
 would it be.  I said the server, naturally, but that we'd also do what
 we could (given our limited resources) to make the desktop palatable
 also since a lot of us (including myself) do indeed use FreeBSD on the
 desktop.  I also said that most of the desktop efforts Linux was
 currently engaged in, like KDE and Gnome, benefitted us just fine and
 that we've put a fair amount of work into encapsulating this work in the
 ports collection so that it's easily accessible.  This is hardly the
 sign of a group who places no importance on the desktop whatsoever, and
 again the question was what our *focus* was, which is of course the
 server.
 
 I'm sure Linus Torvalds has this problem too and all it goes to show is
 that you have to take what you read in print with a grain of salt and
 certainly shouldn't be so naive as to assume that we've "made a pact
 with the devil" or any such paranoid nonsense.  If you want to know my
 real opinion on something, try asking me.  You know where to find me.
 :-)
 
 - Jordan Hubbard
   Co-founder/Release Engineer, The FreeBSD Project
   Walnut Creek CDROM


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